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July 23rd, 2013 
An asylum seeker is upset after learning she will not be going to Australia but to Papua New Guinea under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new policy. Picture: Dept of Immigration of Citizenship
Source: Supplied
They are moments of heartbreak, for the woman whose hopes suddenly collapsed, and for anyone watching.
Iranian asylum seekers are told by officials they will not be going to Australia but to Papua New Guinea, and shock wrenches them physically.
One woman appears stunned and spreads her arms as she pleads for the journey she had expected to make. Another, sitting on the floor, clutches her head over her knees, unresponsive to the comforting from a male companion.
The brief video glimpse into the anguish on Christmas Island on Sunday is painful to watch, and it is meant to be. It was released by the Department of Immigration to ram home the message that the usual asylum seeker route to Australia has been shut.
The objective, says acting regional manager on Christmas Island Steve Karras, is to convince them that returning home is a better option than PNG.
“And I think that was sinking in a bit,” he says on the video of unidentified new arrivals.
The aim is to wreck the lucrative exploitation of desperate refugees by people smugglers, but the boat people themselves are also casualties of the dramatic Rudd Government policy change.
The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today said the PNG Agreement was a moral and ethical response to the increasing number of asylum seeker arrivals and the more-than 1000 boat people who had died on the journey over the past five years.
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